Trial removal of some OOC Channels - Update Feedback

[Myrella]

I'm late because I haven't been playing nearly as much since tells and guild channels are gone. Feels less like a tabletop experience, and more like a anonymous MMO without them, and I've found it harder to keep signing in.

[AlwaysShunny]

I would have voted negative. Tells I can do without, but the lack of guild channels have completely gutted any motivation I have to participate in my guild, since it's rare I'll meet other members in game.

[Satoshi]

I certainly feel like the pboards are perfectly usable for ooc finagling for scheduling, and I've done it in two guilds now successfully. I forgot they existed for a short while after joining, but now that I've remembered they're handy and don't really take that much more thought or time to add to. After all, is 'note edit #' and then pressing enter and typing your message that much harder than 'tell <name> message'?

Not to mention that, for AlwaysShunny's case...the lack of ooc communication has you not participating because you don't have IC interaction? You aren't getting IC interaction either way, so really you were just making friends oocly with the player. IC avenues like messages or notes left in the headquarters or other covert options I might not know about can easily take that ooc communication IC and actually affect your character rather than blurring the lines between ooc and ic communication.

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All in all I feel that I like the lack of tells, since there ARE alternatives that work very closely. ooc channel can be turned off, chatting can be done in discord if you really wanna chat, and super important scheduling things CAN be done via pboard with minimal effort extended forward. And you CAN address a pboard to an entire guild, so they function for scheduling just as well as guild channels, and I feel the 'X wrote/edited a note on the pboard' message a lot less interrupting than a bright red message, AND i can choose to read the updated note at my leisure (such as in a lull of posting or once I'm out of my current scene.)

[wimple]

I think it's best if we don't assume someone was blurring IC/OOC lines because they liked guild channels. Sometimes a sense of community and knowing you aren't the only one out there is motivating - their IC character doesn't need that motivation (or may not be able to get it if play times are severely different between members) - but it's an OOC thing that makes it worth it. There are LOTS of barriers that people express in creating antagonistic characters. If a lack of community via the lack of guild channels is impacting a covert guild, that's legitimate feedback. That's just my assumption of what was meant based on that brief feedback, though, not that meeting/interacting with people IC was the problem. So, it'd probably be better to ask how and why the lack of guild channels have impacted their motivation to play/RP then conclude its IC/OOC.

[Kinaed]

Overall, at the time of writing this post, it looks like a small majority of the pbase is positive for the removal of tells and guild channels. There is a reasonable proportion of people who are negative, and a lot of people in the in-between category.

Interestingly, it appears from the comments that those who don't enjoy the removals may already have fallen a bit to the wayside as players, but overall we've seen a massive increase in both the number of people logged in and the amount of RP happening (these are hard, underlying statistics), but it's not clear if that's due to less tells/guild channels and the requirement to actually go RP with people about inconsequential things that used to be managed by tells, or just the fact that we've hit summer break.

So, thank you all for the check in a bit of the way into our trial, I wouldn't say we've made any firm decisions as of yet.

[Kuzco]

Kin I thought you were gonna say "we got more players because facebook" </3